


you can tell me if anyone can

by ninety6tears



Category: The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: F/M, Insecurity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 12:47:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/622293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninety6tears/pseuds/ninety6tears
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She always knew she was taking a chance on Larry, but in the end the sacrifice wasn't the one she expected to make.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you can tell me if anyone can

**Author's Note:**

> After finishing this book and loving Larry Underwood all the way I couldn't help feeling that L & L's relationship got shafted on the development (especially in comparison to Fran & Stu), though I acknowledge the possibility that it's a crucial omission, given that the amount of Larry's actual passion for Lucy can be ambiguous at best. With this fic I guess I set out to do something between resolving the uncertainty and merely exploring it further; whether I did one and/or the other I think is up to the reader.

The sound of him humming was what reminded Lucy that she wasn’t alone before she opened her eyes. A faint mumble of indecisive melody from several yards off was a more immediate reminder than the other bodies lying to her side. The kid had a sweet hiss of sleeping breath and the woman had her back turned, black rivers of hair dealing down between the nibbles of spine.

She went and found him sitting with that guitar lying over his thighs, a pick held in his mouth while something was stalled in his mind. There was the small whiny tap of an idle finger banging against the frets, and he shifted it back up to play, but then noticed her and put it back down, nodding with a small smile. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected (that he would look surprised to see her all over again?) but there was something about his natural lift of morning that made her feel her limbs locking back into structure after those long weeks of savage aloneness. That high singing of relief from the day before hit through her again. 

She swept a hand at her forehead. “So this is embarrassing.”

“What’s up?”

“I guess I forgot your name while I was asleep.”

“It’s Larry,” he said, and since he’d already been standing up he stuck out his hand with a small chuckle, and she shook it for that sake of playful congeniality. She was sure he’d told her his last name the day before; he must have decided this time that last names barely mattered now.

“I’m good with faces and bad with names. I’m sorry, by the way,” she said, feeling like she’d been waiting for a chance to say this to only him, “if I was a little crazy, when we first...”

“Nah.”

“I think I almost fainted on you.” She was pretty sure; she vaguely remembered his hands steadying her at the shoulders while the world almost seesawed, and then she’d gone to Nadine and thrown her arms around the woman, crazed with safety. After last night, she felt a little more sturdy on Larry’s dock. She wasn’t sure why.

“Kinda almost,” he said, shaking his head in consoling dismissal.

“God. Was Nadine anything like that when you found each other? It’s just...it was only me for so long, and with the dreams, I kinda thought I was going nuts.”

“You don’t need to explain yourself, come on,” he said, like it had already been on the tip of his thoughts that that was her habit, and a surprised part of her remembered yesterday when she’d mumbled on about her marriage, the defensiveness still a reflex after all these years and now all these deaths. “And anyway with Nadine I don’t know how she reacted when she saw me. She and Joe were following me for a while, she was probably mostly worried about what he would do. He’s...”

Some of this had been explained to her yesterday, in clear enough terms. “He’s scared."

“It was a lot worse, though. He’s been better.”

She was thinking suddenly of her daughter. He saw the tears when they sprang to her eyes, but she just said, “More people’s good for everybody” in a strong enough voice.

He nodded, frowning. “We’re lucky we found you.”

She’d been so busy being grateful the others existed that it seemed like, for them, surely having each other must have been enough. She didn’t think there could be any open spaces she was needed to fill, and Larry must have only been saying that because she'd been so obviously desperate.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Hmm?” It had been a moment; his voice was coarse with distraction.

“Did you go crazy with relief when you found them?”

After a rather long considering moment he said, “I was about as afraid I'd lose them as anything else.” And then he looked like he wasn’t sure why he’d told her that, but kept talking anyway. “Look, about those dreams..."

But he didn't quite say what was on his mind, so she said what had been on hers. "I'm scared of him. Even when I thought they were just nightmares, I had this feeling like if I could only stay awake, he wouldn't be able to... _see_ into me. Good lord. That sounds pretty loopy, doesn't it?"

"I was terrified," he admitted so simply that her heart thrilled with new trust. "I'd never dreamed like that before. It felt more real than waking up."

“What if it's everyone left alive having the same trip? I mean, there will be other people, not just in Stovington...There’s gotta be. I'm a lot more sure of it now.”

“Yeah,” he said, and they looked at each other once more with that confidence both easily and heavily given. "Still it's good we found you. Four's lucky enough for now.”

Later when they were setting out, Joe hopped on the back of Nadine’s motorbike with the guitar case slung over his back, and Larry gave Lucy a rueful but high-spirited smile as she took the cue to slide up behind him. He seemed to be paying anxious attention to Nadine’s apparently unpracticed rev-off but then nudged over his shoulder: “You got me?” 

She hugged in closer around his ribs and noticed the low easy scent of his hair or of his clothes, gingery and dusty-sweet. “All aboard,” she said, and they tipped up until she felt the sinew of them joined and balancing against the air before the rumble spun up, and they rode off.

 

Joe could play some mean guitar, no joking. It well unwound Larry a couple nights after Stovington while Nadine wound up in the opposite direction; it seemed in fact that Lucy was beginning to lose sight of that caring woman who had rocked her like a child only seconds after they met. Larry showed Joe a version of “Spoonful” that had all the sweet tricky twangs between the solid right-left rhythm and Joe did back the pantomime while still letting Larry take the lyrics. Larry’s singing rode in and out on whims, but it filled the air effortlessly and dropped off at just the right cracks, as practiced as a voice on the radio. Joe, for his part, was almost entirely silent and content. Watching the traded performance with happy wonder over her cup of fire-reheated coffee, Lucy felt the strange shock of something being too still when her eyes wandered halfway to Nadine, who was looking at Larry with a whole lot of tender but not much bliss.

Back where there had been the sporting goods store they'd decided to go without a tent, but the windier nights had left them looting for one in somebody's vacation home. The two of them with their casual motion to steal from the dead had marked the difference between her previous weeks and living on the move; Nadine warned Joe to get far back from the window while Larry theatrically held out the loose brick to Lucy (“First-time breaking and entering for the lady on my left"). Underneath the joking flourish he seemed to think she needed to be the one to do it; with the strength she had she chucked hard and made the view of the living room splinter and web. Larry threw a bag in to finish the job and ran around to unlock the front door so the others could avoid the glass.

Lucy was with him in the basement when the battery failed in the flashlight. "Nadine!" Larry yelled up. "Open the door, let some light down here, will you?" Nadine must have been outside somewhere with Joe. 

They'd had to step around too many hard surfaces on the way to where they were for the darkness to seem harmless. "Here," he said, and somehow she knew he meant to take his hand, somehow she had already been reaching for it, and their grasps found each other.

"What if there are bodies in this house?" she asked through the dark, because she'd been wondering since they broke in. "I'd make sure Joe doesn't see that."

"Nadine will have checked. Or we would have smelled them, anyway." His fingers tightened around hers; she wasn't sure if it was for giving comfort or taking it. "And don't think about that." 

They led each other by the hand until they finally found the bottom of the stairs.

She woke up one night, maybe that same night, to something that wasn’t quite an argument on the other side of that separation that felt at once thicker and clearer than a tent wall. She thought she heard an agitated attempt at an apology, gruff but colored with a sincere note that was tight with worry, Larry's voice dropping out as if some look or motion had chastised him. Her mind gave it the troubled curiosity of a child hearing something beyond her understanding from the adults around the door, and she soon fell asleep again. In the morning she almost knocked into Larry on her way getting up, not realizing he was sleeping next to her while Nadine and Joe had stayed outside. 

 

She didn’t fall in love either, at first, in fact. Or she’d thought, when she first realized that if she reached for him he’d reach blindly back in the dark for her warmth, that it would be a necessary love. The type of love she’d had for Wes, which had grown out of loyalty and careful watering, but had not been much of anything like this. Necessity and need: they mean the same thing, but one doesn’t burn like the other.

The first time they woke up alone together it was each from their restless slumbers to find the other's body stirring up almost at the same time. It was just barely still night out with a calm rain tapping against the tent walls. Larry sat up to get some water from the Thermos and handed it to her, falling back on his elbows. They began to talk about nothing in particular until Larry talked about living in California, about shacking up wherever he wouldn't strike up noise complaints, and about home in New York before that.

“I don't miss the subway. The more crowded together everybody is, the more they have it in for each other,” he said with his voice still crackling a little with sleep, and even though she could hardly see him through the dusty light she could picture that wry crook of his mouth. “The places where you can avoid bumping into other people, that’s where they really want to. It’s all just taking other people for granted. I guess we finally got the picture in the worst way.”

A light silence turned up between them, and she wasn’t sure what they seemed to be listening for: Nadine or Joe making some noise of being up or that vague and steep danger that might whisper a taunt through the thin night. Somewhere outside the child would be cradled next to the fire where he’d fallen asleep; Nadine could very well be up and walking around in that hypnotized way she had. Lucy looked at Larry’s vague form next to her and could feel him looking back. She felt very much awake, the sound of the rain dimming in some small rush, and thought maybe he wanted back.

She reached over and touched him on the knee. His breath seemed to change even as he didn't move; but then, he leaned in.

He kissed her for a bit before doing anything else, as men reliably have the idea that’s the nice thing to do, no matter what the next thing means to them. His mouth was strong and slow and good, but it seemed neither of them had had it in a while and the rest of it hooked into them fast; she looked down at one point to realize her hands were moving in quick fumbles of want to unbuckle his belt, and in a moment his hands were pulling cold morning air down her thighs, slipping her pants off over her knees. 

They rucked up shirts to feel at skin but didn’t take them off. His hand glided down her underwear and slid through wet and he whispered a crazed and oddly guilty “Ah, _please_ ,” as if she hadn’t been clear enough. His eyes were closed and his mind haywire behind them when he was inside her, when he quietly groaned that she felt so good.

He was through fast enough that he had to use his hand to get her sated, her hips gliding up in ecstatic coughs to meet the teasing slowness. After that and in a laughing embarrassed way, he said, “I’m not always so fast. Goddamn.”

“Let’s just agree we’re both usually better at this, Mr. Underwood,” she played, using her fingers to comb down some of his hair.

“I’ll shake on that, Ms. Swann,” he said, kissing on it instead.

He held her through what was left of the night, politely indeed. Just when she might have thought he'd drifted momentarily back into sleep, he made an aimless mutter of "Lucy." 

Even at the time, when she didn’t really know yet, it occurred to her he could have been thinking of someone else, with the way he needed to try out her name like that. 

 

She wondered with a flat quality to it whether she missed Wes very badly in that way, missed his body. Larry was almost nothing like her dead husband, at least in the immediate ways, and maybe that should have been her first warning. Wes had been uncomplicated, flawed here and there but safe and relatively predictable.

At first she thought Larry was just enough for her to let him do what he wanted with her, only just enough, not good enough for it to go much further than that. How could she love him, when she felt that strange sway over him?—his burdened moods when she could feel his thoughts leaving the earth and wondered what exactly it was he was holding onto for dear life, where it would leave him if he let go.

“Stay here?” she asked, when she felt him stirring up one morning, before she could stop herself. He lay over her and kissed her broadly and they begun their uneven dance for the day.

He had obviously been with many women. Lucy had had a good number of men before Wes but they'd mostly had bullishly uncreative ideas about what they wanted her to do, and for lack of needing to try she always felt she’d wound up a little one-note. Larry hardly complained, and there was a part of her that ached for him to want it this or that way and say so, like that would mean they were this or that to each other. But it was enough to drive her right off her mind that he was getting pretty good at her, sweet and slow and hitting the right pitch.

Those boys and men whose enjoyment of her enjoyment was always a little too sneering, they were years behind her and still she hadn't lost that tamping habit of trying not to love it too much, a part of her possibly believing that if the man sussed too much "yes" she'd lose him altogether. But while the reflex thrived in a shamed way, and while she understood in her heart that Larry probably couldn't bear to think any more than she could that he thought less of her for coming to him easy, she wouldn't pretend not to see that he was cut to be a man whose ego would look out for the woman who kept down her skirt. And as he would learn, she had no intention of letting him fool himself.

He noticed when her usual fervor was dulled by nerves, of course, and pressed to it: he stalled, bowing over her to kiss her and plead, "Come on honey, let it go, I got you..." She held to that lack of denial, and plunged. She loved.

She hadn’t thought she could do that again, how that was even possible after what she’d lost and what she’d seen and what this life had done to both of them, but in the wide open dust of the world she’d buried one heart and then grown another. As simply as turning over your pillow to use the cool side, she thought with some shame.

The sheets were clean when Larry showed her the house he picked out in Boulder and he carried and dropped her onto them after they blazed through their first afternoon there, after he introduced her to others as more or less the woman he was with and loved, as if saying it enough would make it true.

If anything did make it the truth, it was the comforting constant ellipsis of each other, the wonderful domestic hand-off of bumps and slip-ups: burning their first breakfast so that he offered that he knew how to make some things too, noticing his sleepy smile looking her way from the bed while she shimmied to imagined music while brushing her teeth, Leo coming home too early and almost walking in on Larry trying to pull down her panties with his teeth. No one else could have had those things, it felt like no one else had it quite this good, like they’d skipped the lusty honeymoon and were transported magically to where they’d held this life together already for years. Somehow she was sure, she felt that he was all there, as long as the sun hadn’t gone down.

That woman could have been living here, not Lucy, if things had only gone a little differently, and in that fact she had already been there and could haunt the place all she liked. Into the night Lucy sensed something roving over Larry's thoughts, and it had to be Nadine crackling through the dark, white threads strung and humming over him like a power line.

 

Shortly before dawn, as if startled awake by nothing more than the grief, she woke up missing her girl so badly she could have gone and drowned herself somewhere. Larry’s arms were already there and they stirred and turned her in tighter just as her sobs started. He mumbled again and again that it was going to be okay and she felt that shake of deference in his voice and his hands. What must have been almost an hour later, they slid into fumbling love until her head was emptying dryly in the heat and her mind accepted that magic trick, that the feeling was enough. 

They got high and tight with pleasure almost simultaneously and when he let out that groan that meant he was pulling back she heard herself begging him not to; he gasped with something unreadable in his eyes but then he gave it in her body, breathing rock-hard. 

They collapsed softly and wordlessly and might have gone all the way back into sleep, might have left it alone, but he muttered, “So we’re trying?”

His tone was mild but she cringed her face into her hands. “I’m sorry. We should have talked about it, I—”

“It’s okay,” he said, and it really sounded true. Later she would hear through the couples grapevine that he vented his thorough insecurities in Stu's direction until he was assured that Leo was in steady enough hands and so would be any other kid that might come Larry's way; but that night was not the time. “A lot of the women are; I’d wondered if...”

“Larry,” she interrupted.

She felt him looking at her while she looked at the ceiling, his fingers brushing a couple strands of her hair out of her sweat. “What?” he said.

“Look, if we catch a kid, it wouldn’t just be—it wouldn’t be like I’m just making sure you stick around.”

He'd flinched perceptibly before she was done saying it. “Why wouldn’t I be around?” Maybe she could only hear what she feared, but the retort seemed a little too quick.

“Larry, I’m not saying you’re the type of man who’d bolt on me,” she said, her voice a little rough. “I’m just not dumb enough to be proposing, alright?”

She hadn’t really looked at him in the dusky light this whole time, and when she did she was almost changed by what she saw: that strange grip of guilt and hope that happened in his eyes, so wracked and desperate she was wondering if she could have missed it before when they’d only been with each other in the dark.

It had been different ever since that night, when he’d fallen into weakly confessing that he loved her as much as he could (confessing, too, that he didn’t love Nadine as much as he could help it). He had been sad and touched with fear and something else imminent and beyond her understanding, and she didn’t trust herself anymore to have noticed if it only got stronger, if it went away; it was in this confusion she was scared of how well she didn’t know him in certain ways.

After a long time he spoke. 

“Maybe I am that guy. Maybe I am, that’s what you don’t understand,” he said. “...But that doesn’t mean I would do that to you.”

That look in his eyes made more sense to her the next day. Leo called her “Mom” for the first time. It was uttered naturally when he asked her something about the old photos on the bank walls, and at first she thought no one else had noticed, but as she was breathless with a sudden painful hope whittling right into her she looked and saw Larry smiling to the air in a way that didn’t seem to be in response to one of the judge’s comments, and she also saw that the smile was just a little sad.

She’d thought all this time that one of them knew how this was going to end, how far it could go before it sputtered out, but it must have been that neither of them did. It must have really been that Larry didn’t want to lose her. And his fear only made her more afraid, made her forgive what he hadn’t yet done.

 

Her mother used to say, “It’s the lady or the tiger, I guess,” with a sigh, when faced with what seemed like an impossible decision. Lucy didn’t understand this until the short story leaped out at her when she was flipping through a library book. The king punishes this peasant who was messing around with his daughter by making him choose between two doors, one of the chambers holding a woman he would have to immediately marry, the other a starving tiger. Of course after some conspiring the princess gets the inside info on what’s behind each door, and she can give the nod to the peasant so that he knows which one to open. But the point of the story isn’t to reveal the ending, just to ask: Did she send him to a gruesome death or to another woman’s bed? Even reading it as a little kid she’d had her stubborn answer, that sometimes there’s more loyalty in letting go than there could ever be in having.

Nadine seemed to only appear around Boulder in dark slips of motion. Every time Lucy saw her she was newly struck by that velvet richness of her features, but there wasn’t just jealousy but some uneasiness there. Once when she and Frannie were on their way to see if they could find Leo some water balloons, the profile seemed to crawl right out of the shade of a tree: Nadine was a thick twist of roots writhing up from the ground in fast motion, and then she was simply a woman in a brown dress, hoisting up after a rest from carrying something that looked heavy. 

Next to her Fran was talking and talking, and Lucy blinked back again, stunned out of time. There was something about the woman that seemed able to tip a very fine scale, something about the way she was only the edge of any of them, something that made Lucy not know what to do. 

_I want him to be so happy, God knows, I told him so, but what if she’s claws and teeth, what if she'll take him down whole, what if—_

“Lucy-bird,” Fran said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, picking up her pace and thinking to herself, _Jesus, cut that out_. “Yeah, sorry.”

And then she came for him that night and Lucy saw that impossible lure in the air, the bitter path he would take as surely as sailors returning to sea. She could only sob and pray in the bed that smelled of him and her, fiercely wondering what can ever become of trying to give love or get it or give it away. If something so good could ever be a human thing, if all they do is borrow and beg for it and get just a shred along the way and call it love. 

She remembered the moment when she knew she was falling for him, a revelation she’d tried in vain to dispose of: Nadine’s cold shoulder on some ambiguous morning-after and Larry’s sad, sad eyes and Lucy thinking she’d do just about anything to make him stop looking like that. She remembered watching him grow into himself with pronounced deliberate shakes, could still feel his hand restless under hers before they announced his name for the committee and how only a little before now she'd been nothing but modestly grateful that she may have been a small push in getting him there. All that love, and now all she could think was how badly she wanted to beg him to change his mind and come back and keep on playing this impossible game.

 

And then the door opening and the words and then the lack of words, his face pale in the twitch of lamp light, his skin needing warming.

He still wanted Nadine, she thought. She could feel it in the charge of his bones, wondered if maybe she would always feel that. But he was here. That mattered more than she would have thought it had the power to matter; maybe there was something to be said for necessity after all. The idea of something cloudy and less prescribed, something like passion being the thing that turned him back to her, it seemed crazy after all those nights of feeling out how restless he was; but she felt a gradual severity from him too, how much he’d scared himself, in the way he was touching her. Maybe.

He was caressing her legs and pulling them around him readily, but then moved back to sit up against the headboard and pulled her with him, urged her to sink down onto his lap until they were sitting fiercely into each other, their names happening to the air and then dwindling into wordlessness until she pulled hard on his hair and moaned high and he rolled her down under him and was shakily close to coming with his mouth muttering to her collarbone, “Oh, Lucy. Don’t let me go." And then he stilled with the gasping, dropped the curve of his neck over her shoulder as if in a gesture of gratitude for some highest regal pardon, while she didn't let go.

Some day soon she would. But that night she didn’t, that night she held on tight. And she held him against her when he caught her in the kitchen for a jeering tickle or a naughty squeeze, held onto him for a lingering moment after tucking in the tag on the back of his shirt, and held him closer than ever in the makeshift hospital room with a dying Abagail Freemantle and their town shredded into new grief. And later after what the woman had to say she held him goodbye and then, then the leaving, because there was nothing she could do about it, because she knew he’d either go and accept whatever he had coming, or stay, and never be the same again. She watched him fighting tears against Leo's little shoulders in an embrace that was no question about fatherly, and then they had their private last. 

Of course she would never forget a thing about it. She'd given what she thought would be the last touch, struggling not to cry as she turned away, when he stole her back by a grip on the arm as if something in him had just then awakened, startled by the cold loss. As she was turned back into his arms, his eyes were filled woefully in awe of her. He kissed her hard. 

 

She dreamed him vividly one night, a few weeks after he’d gone.

They were surrounded by forest again, those calm outdoors halfway surreal like it was only a movie based on the journey before, the cold nights and honey-burn mornings on their changing way to Boulder idealized in birdsong and clean grass you could almost taste. It made music. He kissed her a kiss too certain to be imagined and too crystalized to be real; it settled as surreal in a way that took hold of her and made her realize this was no ordinary dream, a dream that is only as real as forgotten history. This one was talking to her, and yet it had so little to say.

He looked at her unburdened, in a way he’d rarely gotten the chance to, with his mood springy and adoring, ain’t-I-a-lucky-guy. He was grasping her as she had her back to a mammoth tree, kissing her forehead as something winged nearby dove up into flight; he let himself down to his knees before her, and kissed one hip and kissed the other. And then he stopped and rested his head on her belly, rested it for what seemed like a long time.

She awoke with a tight zip of pain in her spine and a huge swell of feeling in her heart, but she didn’t cry then. 

When Fran came over the two of them managed one of their optimistic but fragile moods. Leo was playing something the next room over while they threw a half-attentive game of checkers, the board sitting between them as they lay on their backs on the floor trading memories of high school embarrassments. Lucy was telling her about Eric Clapton and the boy she went to see him with when suddenly Fran gasped and sat up with an alert narrowing of eyes.

“What?”

“I just remembered who did that song."

It took Lucy a second to realize Fran was gesturing to the next room. "The one Leo's playing...Sure, I've heard it. It was one of the last big hits."

This response made Fran's grin bigger. "He got a lot of these songs from those albums he rooted out of the store, right?"

She saw that Fran was already getting up and said, "Yeah, they're in his room. He won't mind if you take a look."

"Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

As if Lucy had much of anywhere to go. She stirred her tea, cocking an eyebrow, and waited.

Fran came back a few minutes later holding a record single and still smiling. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked, handing it to Lucy.

She squinted at the name for a long time, Fran's excited explanations buzzing past her.

“But no, come on," Lucy said. "It’s gotta be a different Larry Underwood.” Her memories in her mind were pinching for the vague impression of the melody they still held: there was a foggy few lines of the song playing over her and Wes waiting for their milkshakes at Erick's Diner, he's a righteous man, baby, something something something; she couldn't quite hear the voice.

“I don’t think so. Leo was playing that song one time, and I was swearing the name of the guy who did it was right on the tip of my tongue, and then Larry...well, he got kind of funny about it.”

“We'll have to check out if he released any other stuff; if there's a whole album there might be a picture of the guy on the cover...” Lucy let the record fall out of the sleeve to handle it delicately at the edges, trying not to frown.

There was no fooling Frannie. “Lucy. If there’s anything he never told you it’s only because he doesn’t like the guy he used to be. I knew that much about him the first time we ever talked.”

There were only the printed lyrics and some acknowledgments in the label notes. Lucy read, “‘Sincerest thanks to Neil Diamond for the education on how ‘Can You Dig’ really shouldn’t be performed.’" She vaguely realized or remembered something and said, "Oh, what a bastard.”

For a moment they were both laughing, Fran hit with high cheer and falling into Lucy’s shoulder. Fran said what they were probably both remembering: “'You can bet they play that crap in hell.' He was ragging all over Stu's taste, but particularly on the Neil. Those two could go for ten rounds on Diamond versus Young."

Lucy was having a harder time keeping up the smiles. "Maybe it's just some singer who's not being a smartass. Maybe it's not our Larry."

“Only one way to be sure," Fran plucked. "You'd know his voice, and you haven't really listened to it yet.”

Lucy was biting her lip. “Could we wait?” She slid the record back into the sleeve and held it carefully but surely at the corners, feeling a tight crease forming between her eyes. Fran looked like she understood that what Lucy meant was that she’d want to be alone and that this should be just for her, and she would probably also go all the way to that record store just to make sure none of the other copies would end up where they would be found by anybody who knew Larry.

“I’ll say again that it makes enough sense,” Fran said in thought, “but I am a little surprised he wouldn’t say anything about it.”

“I’m sure that Judge would have a really fine way of explaining it,” Lucy said, and her mind tripped jaggedly into the fact that Judge Farris was far, far away, in the same place where Larry was. One way or another.

She began to cry.

“Oh, Lucy.” Frannie reached out.

Lucy sniffed shakily. “I think I’m pregnant.”

Fran’s eyes widened. “What, did you wake up sick? We should go get you checked out by George or—”

“No—No, it’s not—” Lucy shook her head. “I’m not even late yet, it would probably be too soon to tell.”

Fran sat halted in confused compassion. “How do you—?”

“I just _know_ ,” Lucy cried, and then sobbed harder and harder because she wouldn’t bring herself to put words to the other thing she knew. 

Fran held onto her for a long time, while they thought fearfully of the loose ghostly futures of their children, and tried not to think of their men.

 

A while after Frannie had left and after Leo was sleeping soundly on the couch, Lucy sat cross-legged in front of the record player and took the vinyl out of its sleeve. She held it like a talisman as she lowered it onto the turntable (Side B: "Sally's Fresno Blues") and then turned the switch on. The black-blooded surface began to rotate around the red label; her eye followed the top of the ‘L’ around in its pirouette until it was a disorienting blur. 

She lifted the needle and then waited. The record continued to spin and spin on, mechanically and dizzyingly eternal. With her left hand she wiped a couple tears off of her face. With her right she continued to hold up the needle. 

She was waiting a long time for her hand to stop shaking, to become steady above the spin so she could lower it onto that static rind without a jump or a scratch. She was waiting long enough to think it never would, but it finally did. It finally did.


End file.
